


Pampering the Pony

by mahwaha



Category: Homestuck
Genre: M/M, Massage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-21
Updated: 2014-04-21
Packaged: 2018-01-20 06:20:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1499894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mahwaha/pseuds/mahwaha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Your servitude is your bloodpusher, and when you accepted Karkat Vantas you gave him the reins for both.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pampering the Pony

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spockandawe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spockandawe/gifts).



The evening air feels exquisite, fanning through the open windows. When the temperature exceeded what your matesprit considered unacceptably chilly, they were programmed to yawn open, just as you’d programmed them to snap shut when the air became cold enough to agitate his warmblood sensibilities. Karkat Vantas had many warmblood sensibilities. They included his explicit instructions to draw the bath hot, before he returned from his outing, and to lay out the currycomb. Er, the brush. Excuse you.

Everything in your shared hive has been arranged precisely in anticipation of the rest of the evening. You have rinsed your body of the sour stench of your own sweat, prior to filling the tub, and have yet to dent or break a single piece of the night’s affairs. While Karkat was out, you invited Nepeta by to twist your mane into thick plaits—she learned how for you, and has mastered the elegance and STRENGTH of a proper braid. Now, if only she would listen to your advice to grow her own mane long, so as to give off the airs of a proper young troll. Before you have the time to trot that thought further, the door to the ablutionblock slides open.

“There you are.” Karkat, for his diminutive stature, has a presence that floods the room. Whatever slurry arranged you into the sturdy, thick-limbed troll of today did not match that which formed his petite build. However, no amount of power can move Karkat Vantas. You look upon him fondly, cracked teeth put on display from where you perch on the edge of the tub. You are nude, and the sturdy metal of its structure cools your glutes. He surveys you with impropriety; you can see the path that his eyes map from your face downward, and it makes you a bit b100 in the face. “Get in the tub,” he says, and his hands catch the hem of his (admittedly hideous) sweater to pull it from his (admittedly soft) torso.

You are too smitten to linger long.

Tongues of steam lick your heels when you twist to dip them into the water, and you hear the soft plop of cloth hit the floor beneath your hiss. It’s hot when you move to sink the rest of the way down, but you don’t rend the metal of the tub. You do leave your fingerprints on the inside brim, but they are shallow and faint. The water comes up to the shelf of your chest. Your feet are already flushing from the heat when you feel Karkat’s hands graze your shoulders. They are blockier than yours, with inelegant wedges for fingers. 

Those inelegant wedges trace the line of your jaw back towards your hairline, and undo the deft work of your meowrail (hurk…moirail) in long, easy pulls. He, like Nepeta, does not appreciate aesthetics as much as he should. You vow to tell him this later, when his fingers aren’t carding through your hair and massaging your scalp.

“I told you to relax after you finished, not sit like a statuesque tub ornament for me to juggle my shame globes to.” Karkat gives your hair a tug right beside the roots at the base of your skull, then presses his thumbs hard to the muscles of your neck. You sigh at the delicious pressure of his hands, and melt. “Hang on.” He sounds gruff, but minimally displeased. 

“Of course,” you say, as if it were only natural that you would ‘hang on’. That’s because it is; you have yet to disobey him in the term of your matespritship. Your servitude is your bloodpusher, and when you accepted Karkat Vantas you gave him the reins for both.

He cradles the back of your head and rests a short bottle of oil on the rim of the tub, urging you to turn and lie back in the water. When you follow the direction of his hand, you are treated to his incoherent grousing and his fat, beetled brows in a furrow that digs straight into your bloodpusher. You meet his gaze as a smile wobbles across your mouth like the unsteady legs of a colt, and his entire face softens a degree as he wets your hair and sluices water up to the sides of your face with his free hand. 

“I was saying you needed to stop catering to me like a first-time lusus with a limeblood on its claws, and remember to give yourself five fucking minutes to breathe.” Karkat’s frown threatens the edge of a smile, the bags under his eyes as heavy and deep as yours. You delicately catch his hand when he lays it to your cheek, and he thumbs the corner of your mouth between the long, slender rows of your fingers. He makes you feel hotter than the tub, and for one stretched beat you cannot move. You hold his eyes, filled in flushed and mutant red like the bloody hearts on the walls of Nepeta’s cave. Your smile is as tender as your hands before he stoops to kiss your forehead.

“Is that an order?” You let your hand drop, face cool compared to the heat of his lips. Your eyes shut when they trace the bridge of your nose before finding the seam of your mouth, and his blunt teeth snag your lower lip before he pulls away.

“Don’t be a chute nugget,” he says, but his crude language usage loses its bite beneath his laugh. It’s a husky sound, like a cough. It still makes your bloodpusher skip a beat. You sit up as he pulls away, pulls you along so you’re upright and your hair sticks heavy to the back of your neck and the slope of your shoulders. He shucks his pants to the floor to join his sweater, allowing his undergarments to follow before he picks up the bottle of oil. It smells like nothing until he drizzles it into the water and over your skin; then it becomes nutty, and you swirl it into the water with broad strokes of your arm.

Karkat climbs into the tub to join you, after replacing the oil and taking up the brush. The water swallows his shoulders and kisses his neck. You desperately wish to emulate it.

“Hey, stop being a mountain and start being a troll. I’m not going to climb you to brush your hair.” Karkat slaps at the surface of the water, the edge of his voice fond even as he moves to his knees. You stoop to his level, and hardly bat an eye when he takes up a cup to pour the oil-slick water over your head. The brush bristles follow, scratching just so at your scalp, and-

“Oh,” you sigh. 

“Yeah, ‘oh’. This is what basic maintenance feels like, you quadrant-absorbed troll Rocky. Maybe if you pulled your face out of the cleft of my glutes, you’d be able to notice that.” Karkat clicks and whirrs in the back of his throat, fussing as he sections your hair off for brushing. He parts it down the center to reach your face and brushes it back in the same motion that he leans in to kiss you. You will never tire of this feeling, even as it pulls your nerves taut when you oblige him to kiss back.

The press of his tongue opens you wide, even as he navigates the channels of your mane around your horns. Your chest buzzes with the simple pleasure of it. It is a shame when he pulls away, but you chest continues to hum from how content you feel. 

Karkat doesn’t stop at brushing your hair. When he has finished crafting it into a sleek river behind you, he rubs the oil in the water into your skin. His small hands are persistent over the unforgiving cords of your arms; they start at your shoulders and pull down, until they are milking the tension from your palms and fingertips like a particularly plump udder. The tension that he takes from you ekes from him, too, and when he moves to work his hands across your chest he does so fluidly. Everything is slippery with oil—his skin, your skin, and the slope that your smile coasts down into improper degrees of silliness. You laugh when he tickles down your sides, holding your hands up and missing the impish tilt of his smirk.

“Gimme your legs,” he orders, and you unfold them immediately. He settles between them, leaning his back against one to pull the other over his lap. The magic he works with his hands is surreal, and your body goes gelatinous before he has turned to attack your other leg. It is obscene, how languid you feel. You are sprawled out in the tub like an invertebrate, boneless and easy. 

You didn’t realize that you’d begun to doze until a sloppy kiss makes your stir, wet and with too much tongue. You have too much decency to sputter, but your eyes do snap wide—Karkat looks smug when he licks his lips, then yours, and you huff under your breath. For lack of a better word, you say, “gross.” You are afraid that Nepeta’s unrefined descriptors have begun to stick.

“Yeah, well, you’re the troll sleeping in his own skin flakes. Get up and drain the tub. I’m going to towel you off.” Karkat leans away, but not before affectionately pecking your cheek. That greedy hand around your bloodpusher squeezes until you fear it might disappear, so you hasten to do as you’re told. He clambers from the tub to fetch a large gray towel from the counter (right where you’d left it with its twin), and drips onto the short-fibered rug beneath his feet.

When you follow him out of the tub (only after setting it to drain, of course), you kneel before him. He hasn’t had to ask since the youth of your relationship, when you threw yourself into every order with dangerous amounts of enthusiasm. Now, these are practiced motions that you feel secure within—the way he towels off your hair is gentle and familiar, and you know the brush will follow after he mops the water from your neck and shoulders. Then, like clockwork, he complains under his breath while he dries the fresh water from your neck and shoulders. You stand when he finishes so he can work from your chest down, digging into your armpits and buffing the oil into your skin with the towel.

At the end, to bring the drying ritual to a close, Karkat catches you in the loop of his arms and presses his forehead to the planes of your chest. Gingerly, so as not to harm him, you stroke his hair. It’s frizzy from the humidity of the bath, but mostly dry. The rest of him is not, but you know you will have the privilege of remedying this once he had held you to his contentment. 

“I want to take you out, when we’re dressed,” he says. His voice is a firm caress to the twists in your ears.

“I would like that,” you tell him, and smile like you are still six sweeps old and discovering yourself. Karkat has always had that way with you.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope this is to your liking, spockandawe! I loved your prompts, and couldn't resist the idea of a bossy Karkat abusing his authority to spoil Equius.


End file.
